Some of the new improvements coming to Twitter include Instant Timeline, Timeline Highlights, better direct messages, video sharing and news alerts. Read more…

3. Google Announces New YouTube Music Subscription Service

Photo courtesy of Mashable

The service, known as YouTube Music Key, is currently invite-only for a six-month beta test but is expected to be widely available in early 2015. Read more…

4. Pinterest Doubles Its Male User Base

Photo courtesy of SocialTimes

Changes such as hiring former Unilever VP David Rubin, introducing gender targeting for pins, and partnering with companies like The Home Depot have helped Pinterest attract men to what was formerly a female-dominated social media site. Read more…

5. Social Media Killed SEO? #False.

Photo courtesy of MediaBistro

Twitter recently implemented changes that give Google and Bing easier access to 50,000 popular hashtag pages, leading to an increase in the number of logged-out visitors to Twitter from 7.5 million to 75 million per month (wow!). Read more…

6. Clickbait Content Shared Less Often Than Non-Clickbait Content

Photo courtesy of SocialTimes

Clickbait headlines may not actually be the way to go in creating shareable content, given new research showing that clickbait links generate less than half the retweets that non-clickbait posts generate. Read more…

In the coming weeks, Facebook will release desktop and mobile News Feed ads and insights for events. Insights that event hosts will receive include the number of people who have seen an event link on Facebook, the number of people who have viewed the event and the number of joins, saves and maybes the event has received. Read more…

4. There Is Now a Tweetdeck for Instagram

To organize your Instagram feed, Marvel, a London-based prototyping platform, has created a web app that allows you to add columns based on users or hashtags so that users can easily follow updates on certain topics. Read more…

5. Google Stops Displaying Authorship Markup In Search Results

Google will no longer display the names of authors in search results, since the feature wasn’t as useful to readers as Google hoped it would be. Read more…

2. Twitter Partners With Puma to Test “Flock to Unlock” Advertising Program

Twitter has partnered with Puma to launch a new advertising program, “Flock to Unlock.” The idea behind the program is that a deal will be “unlocked” only when a certain number of followers retweet a particular message. Read more…

3. Facebook Adds Ad Scheduling to Power Editor

Facebook added a new feature to its Power Editor that gives advertisers who use lifetime budgets the ability to schedule hours during which their ads should or should not run. Read more…

5. Nielsen Data: Mobile Devices and Social Networks Are Making TV Better

Social media is changing the way we learn about TV shows and how we watch them. Not only does it affect the consumer experience, but it also has proven to be a valuable source for advertisers to tap into social conversations. Read more…

6. Google to Recognize Emails That Use Special Characters

Google has become the first email provider to allow people to create email addresses using letters with accent marks and characters outside the Latin alphabet. Read more…

Facebook plans to compete with Twitter’s real time stream and convince users that Facebook is the dominant social channel to discuss current events. Facebook’s VP of Media Partnerships believes Facebook has an advantage over Twitter in the battle due to its audience size and real identity. Read more…

2. Twitter Testing Threaded Commentary to Retweets

Twitter is testing a new feature called “Retweet with Comment”, which allows users to add their own commentary to a retweet. Read more…

3. Gallup Poll: Most Consumers Not Influenced By Social Media

According to a recent Gallup poll, social media had little influence on consumers’ purchasing behavior. Read more…

4. Facebook Alters News Feed Ranking For Uploaded Videos (Not Links)

Facebook is changing the way it ranks videos uploaded from users and pages by focusing on whether the videos were watched and for how long. This improvement does not apply to links to videos, only videos uploaded directly from individuals and pages. Read more…

5. Lawyers Allowed to Search Social Media Profiles Before Selection and During Trial

The American Bar Association has ruled that lawyers are allowed to search the social media profiles of potential jurors during the selection process. This change could allow lawyers to select jury members that will be more sympathetic to their client. Read more…

6. Google Is Watching to See If You Have Kids (For Advertising)

Google has added a “parental status” tab to its AdWords dashboard, allowing advertisers to target that demographic subset. Read more…

7. Forrester Study: Teens Do Love Facebook After All

A Forrester research study has revealed that teens use Facebook more than any other mobile app. Read more…

1. Facebook and Twitter to Compete for Real-Time World Cup Conversation

With the World Cup only a few days away, Facebook and Twitter will both serve as a platform for news and conversation about the games. Facebook launched a new trending World Cup page that allows users to experience the action in real time. In contrast, Twitter created a Match timeline and World Cup timeline to make it easier for users to keep up with tweets relating to the games. Read more…

2. Twitter Reintroduces Hashflags for World Cup

Twitter reintroduces hashflags, which allows fans to have a flag appear in their tweet by tweeting a “#” followed by a country’s three-letter abbreviation. Read more…

3. Google Incorporates Facebook Hashtags to Search Results

Google has incorporated Facebook hashtags into its search results when users add them to their keywords. Read more…

4. The Psychology Behind Snapchat

Snapchat is appealing and addictive because the app forces users to focus their attention. Read more…

5. Coca-Cola’s World Cup Campaign Creates a User-Generated Experience

Coca-Cola creates a user-generated experience for their World Cup campaign by creating a nylon flag comprised of photos collected from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. After the tournament, each participant will be emailed a link to a microsite showcasing the “Happiness Flag” as a digital memento. Read more…

6. President Obama Has His First Tumblr Chat

President Barack Obama had his first Tumblr chat on Tuesday where issues pertaining to college, education, and student loans were discussed. Tagged online with the hashtag #ObamaIRL, the conversation was moderated with questions from Tumblr users – many of whom are directly affected by student loans and the state of education. Read more…

7. Animal Planet’s World Cup for Dogs: the World Pup

To capitalize on the upcoming World Cup games, Animal Planet introduces the World Pup where dog breeds most representative of each country will be pitted against each other in a single-elimination tournament. Read more…

Samsung is hoping to beat out Google in the latest tech-race to be the first provider of a computing eyewear device. Samsung calls their version “Galaxy Glass.” The device would connect directly with your smartphone and offer many of the same capabilities that have been advertised with the “Google Glass,” including push notifications, music display info, and photo capabilities. Since Google has put off the launch of their Glass to the latter half of 2014, we’ll see if Samsung can come up with a quality product before that time, or end up producing another flop like the Galaxy Gear. Either way, I raise a glass to their efforts.

Google I/O 13, Google’s annual developer conference, happened last week, and I had the fortune of following a few great people on Google+ through their experiences at the conference. There was a lot of talk about Glass and the new Google+ format, both of which I have experienced vicariously through a few people on YouTube. The really interesting part about I/O was the overarching theme of what Google is doing.

Google products are being enhanced and interconnected, with no new products added.Google is virtually replicating planet earth, but “improving” the quality.Google knows what and who you love as we trade convenience for our data.

It’s all true! Google didn’t make any big product announcements at this year’s I/O—they took care of that with Google Glass a month ago. Instead, they made major improvements to all their products.

Google Maps: It’s now better than ever. The improved Google Maps suggests related places and integrates friend’s social information into your map searches. It has a new interface as well, making the map more prominent on the page. Google also combined Google Earth into the maps so you can get the 3D experience on your browser.

YouTube: A new channel layout was announced a few weeks back and is now becoming official for all users. This update makes content discovery on any channel easier.

Search Improvements: With the implementation of Google+, Google search results now include your social graph results as well. Google uses your data to generate better suggestions across all searches, including Maps, YouTube and Images.

So what are the business implications of these changes? Well, if your business is not on Google+ yet, and you’re not +1’ing your own content, you’re missing out on great SEO advantages. If you have a retail business or a restaurant, don’t forget to also include our business in Maps and promote reviews on the platform. Google is still the reigning search engine, and all that data generated by other Google users will help your search positioning and discoverability.

The future looks bright for Google and Android users alike. The company is using big data in all the right ways to create better a user experience and opportunities for businesses to promote themselves.

Google took full advantage of April Fools this year with almost every major app having a great gag.

First is Google Nose, where search integrates with 15 million “scentabytes.” You can even smell “success!”

Althought Google Nose didn’t offer any real functionality; a personal favorite at Renegade is Google Treasure Maps. Where together we can discover the clues to a great treasure! It actually has a setting that will change your Google Maps to the treasure map mode.

Google+ had an emoticon layer you can add to photos. This actually works! Any photo you own and have uploaded to G+ will have a button where you can click to enable the emoticon.

Google Schmick is an Australian Google Street View app that helps you spruce up your house. Now you can give your house a lick of fresh paint for free on Street View with Google SCHMICK (Simple Complete House Makeover Internet Conversion Kit).

Gmail Blue is the great of all inventions! Transform your Gmail inbox into the deepest blues of blues. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to actually be an option.

For those office proficiency geeks, Google launched the “Levity Algorithm” to help make your appointments and documents more exciting! (no iteration of this is really available)

YouTube was by far the best April Fools with the greatest collaboration of pranksters!

Stay tuned tomorrow when Renegade explores pranks from all over the web!

Search Engine Optimization is the language of the Internet. The rules consistently change and everyone has a point of view on how to do it best. There is also the big debate of whether web design or SEO is the higher priority. All that aside, here are the key things you should focus on that don’t have anything to do with search algorithms and are effective no matter the design of your blog!

Site Traffic: How much traffic your blog gets plays a big role. It validates the information on your blog. After writing, focus as much as you can on driving traffic. You can also do this with backlinks fairly easily, by leaving comments on other blogs that mention your topics and putting your address in the “website field” to drive traffic to your post. You should also share your post on social media, especially Twiter, as this creates backlinks as well.

Post Length: Your post needs to be digestible by Google's web crawlers, although this is not as important as some of the other items on this list. If you can, beef up your post to a decent paragraph, to include enough room for a good “keyword ratio,” and then you’ll be well off.

Links: The links you put into your post that cite sources help your ranking. You could also leave a comment on the original source with a link to your site. Completed link-loops won’t hurt!

Tags/Keywords: Use tags and include keywords as a label/tag. A neat trick is to use the site Wordle.net to create a word cloud of your posts’s source article or, if your post is long enough, your own post. The five largest words in the word cloud will be your keywords. It's also important to use different instances of your keywords, e.g., not just using "light,” but also including "lightbulb," "bulb," "lamps," "light bulb" and "lamp."

Site Info: Make sure you have your site’s general keywords in your site description. You can also create a line that is similar to but not the same as your header in the footer of your site with the keywords, as well as a byline for your posts. For instance, you write a lot about recipes of fruit desserts, so “fruit,” “desserts” and “recipe” should be in your site description and bylines. “Charlie’s tasty creations blog” won’t be nearly as effective.

Other Blogs: If you can manage it, create relationships with other bloggers in similar or complementary topics. Offer to reference their work and link back to their blogs. As a group you can help drive each other up in the ranks through backlinks on similar subject matter. You can also guest blog for these blogs and include your byline in your post on their site, which will also help create relevance in the eyes of the web crawlers.

Avoid Copying and Pasting: Create original headlines and content in your blog. Google will go the original source and ignore your blog entirely when it comes to search results.

Google Authorship: Specifically for Google, the Google Authorship program will help your SEO. You must enter a bit of code on your site or byline and then register with Google. Any content that you create will be tied to your Google profile and Google+ account.

So, don’t get hung up on technicalities of SEO. Just focus on these key concepts and you’ll do fine as a blogger. When your site traffic hits a record amount, you can then dive deeper into the SEO game.